SEEKING ROMANTIC ADVENTURES. 
71 
It is a safe rule to allow twenty porters for your personal 
belongings, not, of course, including men’s food or anything else. 
If you wish to travel more rapidly you will take your safari, 
perhaps, the first stage of the way by the railroad, and since you 
thus cover in one day what it would take you several days to do 
marching, you will find the expense comes to about the same. You 
will find that a month away from all base of supplies is about your 
practical limit. For remark (and if you remember this it will save 
you many tedious efforts after calculation) each man carries sixty 
pounds of potto, and each eats forty-five pounds each month. A 
porter is, therefore, able to carry fifteen pounds only for you in 
addition to his food. 
DIFFICULTIES OF A HEAD MAN. 
A safari of one hundred porters—not including, remember, 
gun-boys, head man, tent-boys, cook or syce—can carry for a month 
1,500 pounds over and above their food, and no more. Of course 
this is all very confusing at first. You can only trust your head man 
and keep perpetually noticing things. Gradually it will dawn on 
you that to be a successful head man implies a most unusual com¬ 
bination of qualities. 
In addition to those I have already named, he must be abso¬ 
lutely fair-minded as between man and man. He must be strictly 
just in giving out potio. The little cup of meal must not be heaped 
or shaken for one and just dipped into the sack for another. That 
the safari will not endure. He apportions each man’s daily burden. 
The loads should be weighed before starting from Nairobi. 
After that there can be no daily weighing. At a glance, therefore, 
he must know what each must have. He can have no favorites, 
and no enemies. His eye it is that notes the sick man—the really 
sick—and detects the lazy and incompetent man. He it is who must 
decide who shall be relieved of his burden on the march, and among 
what other reluctant fellows that burden must be shared till number 
one can take it again. 
The multitudinous employments of the camp, as well as of the 
march, he can alone apportion. So many men are chosen during 
